In a letter to his wife, Dora, however, Harry St. John Philby had no reason to rise to diplomacy (it didn’t come naturally to him): “Damn and blast Thomas…I have sworn a great oath not to go home until I have crossed the R. K. twice! and left nothing for future travellers.” Then he shut himself in his room for a week.
It was in 1928, Philby claimed, that “the great peace of Islam slowly and surely descended upon me.” In that year he wrote to the king, Ibn Saud, for permission to convert. According to his friend Hope Gill, “he made no pretence whatsoever that his conversion was spiritual,” but as his biographer Elizabeth Monroe put it, “becoming a Muslim seemed to him the only way of accomplishing the exploit of his dreams.” Finally Ibn Saud granted Philby permission to embark. He left the royal palace at Riyadh, reaching the oasis of Hufuf, north of the Empty Quarter, on Christmas Day 1931, some ten months after Thomas had completed his crossing. Nevertheless, for Philby, “the great adventure had begun,” and he and his Bedouin guides set off south, into the Empty Quarter, on 7 January 1932.
At Naifa, in the heart of the Sands, Philby’s guides rebelled. Their camels were collapsing; there was no guarantee of water to the south. Already they had had to slaughter the newborn calf of one of their camels for food. They would go no further. “The Arab,” he reflected bitterly, “clings frantically, desperately to life, however miserable…I could not, would not, yield.” On 5 March, three months after setting out from Hufuf, he and his remaining guides moved west, finally arriving at Sulayil, on the Empty Quarter’s western border, nine days later, where they were able to recover sufficiently to make the onward journey to Mecca. “I think,” Philby wrote to his wife in England, having completed his pilgrimage, “I have done with desert exploration for good.”
A year before his own journey, Bertram Thomas had told the British political agent in Kuwait that he had “every intention of being the first man to cross the Empty Quarter and to live the rest of my life on the proceeds.” Following his success he was indeed feted by the British press, and he returned to Britain a hero. He was awarded the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society and a CBE; he wrote articles and lectured in America. The Times announced that he had “achieved one of the greatest geographical exploits of modern times.”
And yet, while Philby’s and Thesiger’s crossings ensured their lasting fame, Thomas seems to have allowed himself to sink into obscurity. Today, the first Westerner to cross Richard Burton’s “opprobrium to adventure”—a feat compared at the time to those of Scott and Amundsen—is virtually unknown. In a photo of 1932, captioned “My Party,” the central figure is monkish in Bedouin dress, white and pale grey against his companions’ darker garb and darker faces. He clasps the crook of his camel stick with both hands, and squints out at the camera through wire-framed spectacles. A tall abbot or housemaster. His face betrays neither relief nor satisfaction, unlike those of his retinue. Having arrived at Doha, his account concludes simply: “The Rub’ al-Khali had been crossed.”
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THAT NIGHT, Nigel was in pain, his inner thighs bruised from the hours of riding; but he was genial and solicitous, and from time to time he would get up from his camp chair to speak tenderly to Soran, to stroke his muzzle and feed him flatbreads. It was as if his earlier outburst, in the dazzle of the afternoon, had not happened. My skin smelled slightly of eggs from the sulphurous water at Burkhana (I’d had a dip in the overflow tank). I watched Soran as he stared out across the darkened plain. If your camel stops chewing and stares into the darkness, something is wrong.
“What is wanted is a new master species,” wrote Lawrence: “birth-control for us, to end the human race in fifty years—and then a clear field for some cleaner mammal” (his emphasis). This was the Lawrence, who, in the Sinai, found his body “too coarse to feel the utmost of our sorrows,” and sought “abnegation, renunciation, self-restraint.” Thesiger admits in his memoirs that sex had been of “no consequence” to him: “the celibacy of desert life left me untroubled. Marriage would certainly have been a crippling handicap.”
True, it is partly a matter of old-fashioned, foggy Protestant repression, of a peculiarly English brand. The other desert Lawrence, D. H., reflecting on his transformative time in New Mexico, remembered his native Britain as “an island no bigger than a back garden.” For those sweating, leaking, reeking, dreaming travellers in the hyper-arid Middle East, the desert promised asylum—both from garden England and from their own body and its cursed fecundity and importuning, its uncleanness—at the same time as it consoled those who were denied a true sense of feeling-at-home because of the simple variety of their desires. I remembered that nudge-nudging question from the audience at the Royal Geographical Society, about Thesiger’s “shall we say ‘unorthodox’ lifestyle.”
No wonder they preferred it here. Better to be straddling a camel, miles from the nearest waterhole, than hemmed in by men made from beeswax and snuff.
The devil’s first attempts to seduce St. Antony from his course in the Egyptian desert having failed, he deployed instead “the weapons which he knows every man carries about him in his own flesh; for here he mostly lies in ambush against the souls of the young.” Appearing first as a woman, “the devil threw filthy thoughts into his mind” (Athanasius’s emphasis).
Who was the woman Hassan had sketched in the sand? You might travel to escape the self, but in the desert of all places, where there is little else, you are thrown back upon your mind and your body with intensified force. Quietness offers no liberation, after all: there had been midnights when I swear my libido—whatever it consists of—was audible (somewhere between a stiff door and a backed-up drain). Nope, the body was there; the body was there more than ever, and with it all its claims.
* * *
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BEFORE DAWN I was woken by Soran whimpering; he was saying good morning to Mohammed, who was reviving the banked fire. Crouched nearby, Hassan was using the tip of his pocket knife to bore a hole in a water bottle’s lid. I had seen him do this before: it allowed a jet to be squeezed out for ablutions. He walked away behind a nearby dune, returning a few minutes later. Then he handed the bottle to Mohammed, who went behind another dune. Finally, standing some distance away so as not to wake their guests, father and son performed the morning prayer together.
The determinists tell us “le désert est monothéiste” (Ernest Renan); that the inescapable consequence of peoples existing in a realm deprived of all but trackless ground and cloudless sky is a theology matchingly monolithic and unforgiving. Mohammed was a dryland prophet, just as Christ and Moses were.
John Steinbeck, travelling in the American West, noted that the “great concept of oneness and majestic order seems always to be born in the desert.” Bertram Thomas’s mentor David Hogarth reflected that “the Arab owes in part at least to singular climatic conditions his strong and simple intelligence which has formulated again and again a conception of God simple and strong enough to convince alien myriads of mankind.” The Japanese geographer Tetsuro Watsuji—whose language, he tells us, has no indigenous word for desert, there being no conception in Japan of an earthly realm of death—is of the view that it produces two main characteristics: submission and aggression. “The spiritual characteristics of the tribe of Shem, its thoughts, its religion, its polity and the like can all be interpreted in terms of desert living conditions. This life pattern is that of struggle.”
The theologian William Harman Norton, in an essay on “The Influence of the Desert on Early Islam” (1924), tells us that “the empty environment offers little food for reasoned thought. Surcharged with emotion, the Semite of the arid lands has turned easily to meditation and contemplation of the supernatural.” He goes on to explicate Renan’s position: “As the rich scenic profusion of India and Greece led the Aryan to think of gods as many, so the barren simplicity, the endless monotony, the sterile uniformity of the desert, l
ed the Semite to think of God as one.”
I could barely make out the words, only Hassan’s repeated Allahu Akbar, but as they prostrated themselves to the radiant sky, the scene seemed wholly proper to the place, as if it—the desert itself—were the subject of their veneration.
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LATER, ONCE THE SUN was risen, the ravens reappeared. Their materialising made me aware they had lives lived out of our sight: they’d have been doing something else when they had been prompted to attend our camp. Had they seen the smoke from our breakfast fire? What had they been doing? What would they do when we were gone? I watched them through Mohammed’s binoculars and remembered the ravens described by Thesiger, Philby and Thomas. Thesiger’s guide, bin Kabina, seeing a solitary individual, shouts “Raven, seek thy brother!” and explains to the Englishman that “a single raven is unlucky, a bearer of ill tidings.” To Mohammed it was a matter of delighted awe that they mated for life. The birds were a reminder that the desert was an ecosystem; that lives in their entirety were eked out within its bounds. It was not just a mausoleum or a museum.
Even as we crossed from the dunes back to the plains and the road to Salalah, I wished we were going the other way, north: deeper, deeper into the Empty Quarter. A person who has visited the desert once, Thesiger wrote, “will have within him the yearning to return.” Yet it was impossible to think of him and his predecessors and the brutalities they embraced and not identify in them some grating perversity. Abnegation, renunciation, self-restraint. What I’d come to feel for Thomas and Philby and Thesiger was something like awe, but it couldn’t be called sympathy. To seek to prove yourself against this place, forsake the palms and papaya of the coastal plain, seemed like a betrayal of a glorious endowment. It is easy to mistake flight for quest, yes. For all the desert’s dreamlike beauty, to travel here, as they had, for months and almost blindly, was not just to pitch yourself into oblivion; it was to grind away at yourself until nothing was left. It was to aspire to the condition of sand.
2
FIELD OF THUNDER
The Great Victoria Desert, Australia
In the early fifth century, the founding father of European monasticism, John Cassian, who had lived for years in Egypt’s Wadi Natrun, described the condition known as accidie, which, he said, “we may describe as tedium or perturbation of heart. It is akin to dejection, and especially felt by solitaries, a persistent and obnoxious enemy of those who dwell in the desert.”
In the months after returning from Oman I sank into a mild depression. I liked the word accidie, with its suggestion of tartness, corrosion and dissolution. I could not pinpoint its cause. It was like some virus against which I lacked native immunity. Weirder and more worrying, I developed a condition that began as tinnitus, and evolved, so it seemed to me, into partial deafness, sometimes more prominent in the left ear, sometimes the right. But when I went first to my GP, then to a specialist, even the most sensitive tests showed that there was nothing whatever wrong with my hearing. As I did not think of myself as a hypochondriac, I wondered if it wasn’t some reaction to the giant noiselessness of the desert.
I found I didn’t want to be in London. In the naked flat, with its scent and its photos. It was not only a case of Thesiger’s “yearning to return” or the desert’s appeal to loneliness. I’d been thinking about a desert question, which is also a seafarer’s question: Without witnesses, how do you conduct yourself? In the secrecy of any imagination, to what extremes, what Poles of Inaccessibility, might the mind wander? I’d found I was drawn to the lawlessness of the desert; not only the way norms might be suspended but how, in the absence of regulation or judgement, the word good itself was loosed from meaning. Liberty isn’t only for the virtuous. It was in this acidic spirit of enquiry that I bought a flight to Australia.
* * *
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IN THE DESERTS of Nevada, Kazakhstan and China, in India’s Thar and the French Sahara, hundreds of nuclear bombs have been tested, above ground and below, since the first was detonated in 1945, at a site codenamed Trinity in the Jornada del Muerto Desert of New Mexico. Shortly before that event, a storm broke, prompting scores of desert toads to emerge from their holes and fill the air with their song.
When the British government decided to develop its own “capability” in 1947 it was natural that the planners should look to America for a proving ground. In 1946, however, less than a year after the Trinity test and the subsequent bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. Congress passed the McMahon Act, which outlawed the sharing of nuclear intelligence even with America’s friends. William Penney, the head of the British bomb project, had favoured the testing facilities in Nevada or the Pacific, but now access not just to America’s expertise but to its expanses was blocked. There was of course nowhere in Britain appropriate for nuclear testing. Indeed few places in the world were both environmentally suited—flat, vast, unpopulated, isolated, secure, dry—and amenable to British influence. Penney made a reconnoitring flight to Canada but came to realise that, barring a change in American policy, only one place was really satisfactory. “If the Australians are not willing to let us do trials in Australia,” he concluded, “I do not know where we shall go.”
He needn’t have worried. On 3 October 1952 Britain exploded a nuclear bomb aboard a warship, the Plym, close to the Monte Bello Islands off Australia’s north-west coast. Robert Menzies, Australia’s prime minister, sanctioned the tests without consulting his cabinet, let alone the Australian people, and assured Churchill in 1953 that “Great Britain will no more need to worry about Australian co-operation in the future than she has in the past.” The following year two land tests were carried out at a place named Emu Field in the Great Victoria Desert, some four hundred kilometres north of Australia’s southern coast. Between September 1956 and October 1957 seven more nuclear devices were exploded south of the first two, at a site given the name Maralinga.
After the Emu Field tests, Menzies’s minister of supply, Howard Beale, told the Australian people: “The whole project is a striking example of the inter-Commonwealth co-operation on the grand scale. England has the bomb and the know-how; we have the open spaces, much technical skill and great willingness to help the motherland. Between us we shall help to build the free world and make historic advances in harnessing the forces of nature.”
* * *
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I SPENT TEN DAYS in Adelaide, mostly in the library of the Royal Geographical Society of South Australia, acclimatising and planning my journey to the desert. After a few days I started to experience the city’s orderliness as stifling, and took to hiking out to the hills and the sea, between bouts of reading. Walking on Mount Lofty one morning, I met Céline, a Frenchwoman from Perpignan, who gave me a lift back down to the city. She had a dancer’s lightness of bearing and when she smiled (hardly ever) she displayed a sharkish array of small, sharp, porcelain teeth. She wore sunglasses constantly, and though we met four times, I did not once see her eyes and so cannot say what colour they were. Red possibly.
She was trapped in Australia, she said, because the estranged Australian father of her child refused to leave his homeland. She was half-Algerian, and still found she could be shocked by the offhand racism of even the most liberal Adelaide housewife. She was a masseuse and met a lot of housewives. She longed for Perpignan, whose railway station, she told me, had been designated by Salvador Dalí as the centre of the world. What was it, I wondered, this human urge to stick a pin in the centre? A pin or a flag. Dalí’s 1946 painting of The Temptation of St. Antony, a more austere vision than Bosch’s, depicts a white playa on which a naked, kneeling St. Antony wields a cross at a procession of elephants led by a white horse; each creature walks on hideously extended crane-fly legs, and one of the elephants is surmounted by a statuesque nude brandishing her breasts as if they were mortars. The spirit of fornication.
I went walking or swam in the cold sea
in the afternoon, drank cheap local wine with Céline in the evening (sometimes she brought her son, Greg, who was five) and sank each cool morning, hungover, into the writings of South Australia’s white pioneers, in the Geographical Society’s library.
Here on Australia’s periphery was where the people had huddled since the country’s founding. The “red interior”—the desert—remained even today a foreign land occupied by a foreign people. There was “the bush”—the bush was part of Australia, part of its idea of itself as a nation of plucky pioneers; but then there was the desert. The desert was something different from either the bush or the “outback.” It was not loved, or valued; really it wasn’t part of Australia.
“Let any man lay the map of Australia before him,” said the explorer Charles Sturt during a lecture here in Adelaide in 1840, “and regard the blank upon its surface, and then let me ask him if it would not be an honourable achievement to be the first to place a foot in its centre.” There being no summit to reach, nor any source, the desert explorer’s goal is first the centre—to “cross the heart of it,” in David Hogarth’s words—and then the other side. The earliest explorers of Australia imagined that unseen centre as a green place of abundance. It was in search of an inland sea that Sturt and others embarked. For men of the Enlightenment, the deserts of this new continent, unmapped, undescribed and unnamed, were a slur on national pride. What the Melbourne Argus described as a “hideous blank” was, according to one commentator in the 1820s, “staring Britain in the face with a look of askance and regret.” As early as 1778 Captain Cook’s botanist, Joseph Banks, stated: “It is impossible to conceive that such a body of land as large as all Europe does not produce vast rivers capable of being navigated into the heart of the interior.”
The Immeasurable World Page 6